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Stephanie Coontz

1101 Words5 Pages

In Stephanie Coontz article title "What We Really Miss About The 1950s" Sourced by the book "Rereading America" she seeks to provide insight and critical analysis into why the 1950s are so highly esteemed today and why they are so missed. Coontz sees herself as being well equipped as well as suitably verse in the elements that configure the 1900s. She even goes as far as to use a personal experience from her life during that time to give the reader a deeper understanding into the societal norms that made up the 1950s. It is quickly made evident that Coontz takes her work serious and personal. In Coontz's analysis she used a multitude of factors surrounding the struggles as well as the triumphs experienced in the 50s and in doing so she gives a wide range …show more content…

Coontz's uses three distinct factors in an effort to analyze and gain a better understanding of the 50s. These factors included favorable perceptions of the 50s from those who grew up in them, traumatic events that occurred as well as what lead into the changes of the 50s, including an intolerant nature towards equality, more exact race and gender and the way it plagued the 50s and how the media developed a new idea of life.
Coontz begins her evaluation into the 50s by providing a research poll taken in 1996 by the Knight-Rider news agency in which participants were asked which decade was the best time for children to grow up in. The majority of people surveyed would choose the 1950s. This example showed the reader how large of a group, felt drawn to the 50s. Coontz would not stop there though, she would go on to say that she was not surprised because of the nostalgia of the 50s. That she expected people to look fondly on the decade because of how, " wages grew more in any single year and in the entire ten years of the 1980s combined, a time when the average 30-year-old man could buy a medium-priced home on only 15 to 18% of his salary." It was seemingly a time of great success. Coontz would bring out

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